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Vermilion

(Lou Merriwether #1)

Molly Tanzer (Goodreads Author)

3.61 · Rating details · 1,754 ratings · 328 reviews

The Adventures of Lou Merriwether, Psychopomp

Gunslinging, chain smoking, Stetson-wearing Taoist psychopomp, Elouise “Lou” Merriwether might not be a normal 19-year-old, but she’s too busy keeping San Francisco safe from ghosts, shades, and geung si to care much about that. It’s an important job, though most folks consider it downright spooky. Some have even accused Lou of ...more

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Paperback, 376 pages

Published April 15th 2015 by Word Horde

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· 1,754 ratings · 328 reviews

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Apr 16, 2015 Dan Schwent rated it liked it

Shelves: 2015, weird-western

When boys from Chinatown vanish mysteriously, psychopomp Lou Merriweather gets drawn into the mystery, leading her into the Colorado mountains, to the sanatorium of the mysterious Doctor Panacea. What is Doctor Panacea's connection to the missing Chinese men and what is his true goal?

I've made no secret to the fact that I have a weakness for fiction from the strange wavelengths of the spectrum. When I caught wind of a weird western mystery featuring a half-Chinese psychopomp passing as a man, I ...more

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Feb 26, 2015 E. rated it it was amazing

Earlier this year, I read an advance copy of Elizabeth Berg's The Dream Lover, which is a novel about author George Sand. In it, Sand says "I find I don't wish to be either man or woman. I wish to be myself."

I found Molly Tanzer's heroine, Elouise Merriweather, reflected this idea, too, as people Lou encounters regularly and often mistake her for a boy. Lou dresses in trousers and (to the chagrin of her ma) wears her hair short, and (oh good gosh) smokes cigarettes (after rolling them!). But Lou ...more

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Aug 07, 2015 Jennifer Taw rated it it was ok

This book is bizarre. The first third is fun, engaging, and provocative. The story is infused in interesting ways with issues related to gender identity. The settings (SF and its Chinatown in the late 1800s) are great, the supernatural stuff is silly and entertaining, and the protagonist is competent, interesting, and charismatic. Some spooky stuff happens, which itself is ghoulishly cool, and then the protagonist sets off on her adventure. The introduction of bears and other creatures as part ...more

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Jun 17, 2018 Gabrielle rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, speculative-fiction, reviewed, own-a-copy, read-in-2018, weird, steampunk, urban-fantasy, goodreads-made-me-do-it

I had seen Molly Tanzer’s name kicking around various weird fiction anthologies and I had made a mental note to check her out when I came across her debut novel: a supernatural steampunk story set in the old West, featuring a mixed-race androgynous, gun-slinging psychopomp, uh? How could I resist that?

Lou Merriwether took over her father’s psychopomp business, which means she is called upon when ghosts and other supernatural entities are reluctant to leave our plane of existence: she eases them I had seen Molly Tanzer’s name kicking around various weird fiction anthologies and I had made a mental note to check her out when I came across her debut novel: a supernatural steampunk story set in the old West, featuring a mixed-race androgynous, gun-slinging psychopomp, uh? How could I resist that?

Lou Merriwether took over her father’s psychopomp business, which means she is called upon when ghosts and other supernatural entities are reluctant to leave our plane of existence: she eases them into the other world, sometimes more or less against their will. But one day, she takes on a different kind of strange investigation: a number of young Chinese men from her home neighborhood go missing, lured to the Rockies with promises of good-paying jobs, but they never come back. Or if they do, they are in several pieces. Lou feels duty-bound to follow their trail and figure out what is going on.

I really enjoyed Tanzer’s prose, unpretentious and flowing, and I fell in love with her setting and with Lou. What an original creation that young “lady” is! I have infinite sympathy for a character who feels like she doesn’t fit anywhere and who just want to be herself – instead of being forced to fit into other people’s expectation. Lou’s story of growing up never accepted by the Chinese or the white people of San Francisco, and of wearing what she wants despite the femininity standards of the day were expressed with great sensitivity by Tanzer, and made the character wholly believable… and lovable!

The alternate-historical context in which Tanzer set the story is also a great opportunity to explore very real prejudices people had to deal with at the time, especially racism against the Chinese community (how eager people are to get rid of them!). There is quite a lot of emphasis on diversity, especially in terms of sexual orientation and gender fluidity... perhaps even too much emphasis... It just ends up feeling a little ham-fisted, but its also definitely better than if there wasn't any representation at all.

I did have an issue with some of the language she used, which occasionally sounded too modern for the setting. “Dude”, really? I would have felt more immersed in the world she created had her characters stuck to a period-appropriate way of talking. I have more alternate-historical fiction by Tanzer waiting on my shelf: I’m crossing my fingers she has gotten a bit better with that since “Vermilion”. Despite that flaw, the ideas in here are so original and refreshing that I can't give it less than 3 and a half stars rounded up. I'd be happy to read more of Lou's adventure should Miss Tanzer ever get around to writing a sequel. ...more

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Jun 02, 2015 Bethany rated it it was ok

This book started out really strong. Loved the protagonist, the world, psychopompery. Then we left San Fran. It seemed to me like everything after leaving slowed the book down. Which, in most books, that is the start of the adventure. I would have been perfectly happy to stay in town with Lou and follow her around while she worked.

I'm not sure if it was the introduction of too many characters and too many storylines, but the book just couldn't hold my attention. I kept reading hoping that a ...more

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Dec 31, 2018 Lata rated it really liked it

Shelves: scifi-fantasy, auth-f, poc-actor, x2018-read, western

An interesting alternate history of 1870s San Francisco. Chinese labourers have gone missing, and young psychopomp Lou Merriweather’s mother enlists Lou’s help in finding the men. Lou heads east to the last known locations of the men, and stumbles upon a complicated situation at a sanitarium, including a possibly duplicitous young man working there, and the doctor in charge of the place.
Lou is a brash, tough, and hardworking young woman who chooses to dress like a man and prefers people to ...more

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Mar 05, 2015 Orrin Grey rated it it was amazing

There's so much to say about Vermilion, and I am in the grips of a summer cold right now, and so probably can't do it justice. When I learned that Molly Tanzer's debut novel was coming out, I was already suitably excited, as Molly is a friend and one of the best writers working in our field right now, but when she described it as "taking place in past of Big Trouble in Little China," I was all kinds of hooked, and the end result didn't disappoint.

Other reviewers have certainly covered most if ...more

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Feb 21, 2018 Romi || Romi Reads rated it really liked it

Shelves: to-sell, in-my-possession

Firstly, I want to say that I'm not of Chinese descent. So, I can't say anything about the correctness of the portrayal of Chinese culture inVermilion. Of course, diversity in books is very important, but I find it a little weird when an author from one culture tries to represent someone from another culture. As you can read in the acknowledgements and other notes at the end of the book, Molly Tanzer did a lot of research on Chinese culture. However, I just can't believe she'd ever get the Firstly, I want to say that I'm not of Chinese descent. So, I can't say anything about the correctness of the portrayal of Chinese culture in Vermilion. Of course, diversity in books is very important, but I find it a little weird when an author from one culture tries to represent someone from another culture. As you can read in the acknowledgements and other notes at the end of the book, Molly Tanzer did a lot of research on Chinese culture. However, I just can't believe she'd ever get the "feeling" of the culture as right as when someone originally from Chinese culture would have written it. We've discussed "voices" and minorities a lot in uni and that was something that really opened my eyes as a white person - but I'll leave it with this. (please, correct me if I'm wrong)

In my review I'll focus more on the actual story, which I really loved! I thought it was very original, but also very diverse when it comes to the LGBTQ+ community. At first I really had to get used to the world Vermilion took place in: Victorian San Francisco with a fantasy twist. There were talking bears and sealions and of course Lou's profession - psychopompery. At first I didn't really know what this meant, but I got to know it soon enough. The story starts off with a psychopomp case where Lou has to help a spirit, that's lingering in the human world, pass over to the spirit world. That's basically it. Lou deals with ghosts and other undead and she has all these steampunk tools to help her get rid of these spirits. I thought it was pretty awesome! Nevertheless, it was kind of a let down when European vampires got involved. They're just not as interesting as ghosts *shrugs*

Still, I loved the story. The book has three parts and after I finished reading Vermilion, it actually kinda felt like I'd read three different stories on Lou Merriwether. I really liked her character, mainly because she just does what she likes (without bothering others too much of course). She was a real toughass woman!

Can't wait to read more about Lou and her world!

4.25/5 stars! ...more

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Apr 26, 2015 Paul rated it it was amazing

A fun, full-of-heart, imaginative, smart, romp through a steampunk west with talking bears, undead, and more. You'll want to follow Lou Merriweather, psychopomp, to the very end.

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Jul 20, 2015 Kate rated it it was ok

Shelves: kindle

I wanted so much to love this book - alt history, Chinese zombies, not to mention the wonderful attempt to bring the word 'pscyhopomp' back into everyday use. It starts off well, but that heroine Lou - sheesh, none of her motivations and decisions made any sense once she left San Fransisco. I had no idea why she did anything that she did, and really, I was just hanging about for the last half of the book waiting for the talking bears to come back.

And I admit to actually getting angry when ...more

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Mar 28, 2015 Sarah marked it as put-aside

Shelves: ebook, i-see-dead-people, meh, historical-fiction, looks-intriguing

Original review:This sounds too good to be true?

After getting through about 30% of the novel: I liked the book, but I can't seem to really get into it. The premise is absolutely amazing and unique, but it doesn't live up to my own hype. The seemingly random racism towards Chinese people annoyed me to no end, and it bothered it me a lot. I like it enough, and may come back at another time, but I just can't read it right now.

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Apr 17, 2015 Erin (PT) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: poc, historical, trans-genderqueer, alternate-universe, ghosts, magic-users, steampunk, cowboy-western

I feel really uncertain what I want to say about this book. On the one hand, there's a great deal that delighted me about it. I never felt sure where the story was going to end up, which I love. It was interesting, character-wise and in world-building and if Tanzer makes it a series--as I hope she will--I'm definitely on-board.

But, for as much as I enjoyed the book, it falls short of being completely satisfying, so I liked it a lot, but I don't love it. If pressed to a number, it's a 3.5.

I feel really uncertain what I want to say about this book. On the one hand, there's a great deal that delighted me about it. I never felt sure where the story was going to end up, which I love. It was interesting, character-wise and in world-building and if Tanzer makes it a series--as I hope she will--I'm definitely on-board.

But, for as much as I enjoyed the book, it falls short of being completely satisfying, so I liked it a lot, but I don't love it. If pressed to a number, it's a 3.5.

There's a lot that's really interesting about Vermillion. Lou, our heroine, is a genderqueer, half-Chinese psychopomp. That is, she lays the unrestful dead, whether they want to go or not. Lou struggles--with her gender, her racial identities, with her past, with her future.

Lou's also not the only interesting character. We have sentient, talking bears and sea lions, responsible for massive changes in the history of America and Western expansion. We have the mysterious Dr. Panacea and his right-hand, the equally enigmatic Shai. The love of Lou's past, Bo Wong and his band of monster-hunters and the delightful, irrepressible Coriander. It's a great cast of characters and there's a a broad range of sexual and gender expression to go with it.

But I think that, in the end, I like the ideas and the possibilities of the story better than I like the actual execution. Lou is an interesting protagonist, but she's often not smart and she bumbles her way through the investigation and, while that is a COMPLETELY VALID writing choice, I really prefer stories about smart, competent protagonists. I also feel like, although Lou feels like a fairly complete person, most of the other characters do not feel as full or textured. I spent a lot of the book not feeling sure how I was supposed to take the characters, because on the one hand, there was a certain amount of face value information given...but at the same time, the trappings of the story are those of a murder mystery and surely I wasn't supposed to take so much at face value? Except at the end of it all, I'm pretty sure I was. Which is just less real and less fun (for me).

And then there's Shai. Shai and his relationships with Lou and Lazarus are, in my opinion, the most interesting parts of the book. To use a fandom term, the three of them are weird about each other in really interesting ways, ways I wanted the book to dig into more deeply than it did. But Shai feels weirdly incomplete or maybe fractured as a character. The Shai we see with Lou in the trek to Estes Park and the sanitarium feels VERY different than the Shai we meet later on, and I don't feel like there was enough groundwork to satisfyingly marry those two different presentations. It felt like something big and important was missing from the narrative to explain how Shai could be so different, from part A to part B.

As well, the world building felt like it needed a little more padding. The idea of sentient bears and sea lions, and their subsequent effect on the history of the time, is fun and cool, but it didn't ever quite ground itself or create a strong foundation for the rest of the story to spring from. To compare and contrast, Seanan McGuire's Incryptid series posits a number of supernatural creatures living alongside and barely out of sight of the regular population. Gorgons have jobs at zoos and strip clubs. A dragon lives under NYC. But it's all grounded in a certain 'realism' (for a given value) that colors the entire world. Whereas this felt more like George RR Martin, in that so much of the world is mundanely ordinary that I never know HOW seriously to take it when magic or the supernatural is presented or how far it can be extended. Okay, Lou is a psychopomp, she handles the restless dead...but that doesn't mean that vampires or dragons or werewolves are a natural extension of that world. I don't know what the rules of Tanzer's world are and she doesn't give any real warm up to the pitch. It's just "here you go!" It doesn't feel complete, it doesn't have the heft of something I can entirely buy as 'real'.

So it's good, but I want it to be BETTER. That being said, I do feel it's entirely worth reading and, as I said, if Tanzer goes on with Lou's adventures, I'm in for the long haul. ...more

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Apr 01, 2015 Fantasy Literature rated it liked it

I am a sucker for interstitial characters: those literary beings who work the borderlands and thresholds, guiding other characters and the reader from one state of being to another. In Vermilion, her first novel, Molly Tanzer introduces us to Lou Merriwether. Lou is half Chinese and half English; she is a female who dresses as a male and she is a psychopomp, a magical artisan whose skill is to guide spirits of the dead across the threshold into the afterlife — even if they don’t want to go. You ...more

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Jan 11, 2018 avery (avereads) rated it really liked it

Vermilion is such a strange, odd, bizarre, unique novel and that’s what I absolutely loved about it. Lou Merriweather is unlike any character I have read about before and the aspects of Chinese culture and pyscopomp work was so interesting.

I loved the beginning of the book set in Chinatown in San Franscio during an alternate universe in the 1800’s. The middle of the book when Lou leaves to begin her journey I still liked but there were less elements of pyschopompery and that’s what I really ...more

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Dec 29, 2017 Ginger rated it liked it

Shelves: steampunk, nrbc

December 2017 Previous Release in the Nocturnal Readers Book Box.

This was my 'bedside table' book for 2018. The book that is placed in this position is doomed to be read a few pages at a time throughout the year.
I saw this one labeled as 'steampunk' but it was missing that certain je ne se qua (or whatever) that I would expect from steampunk. It was a bit more of an 'alternate reality western'. Even with my aversion to westerns this wasn't an unpleasant read.
Lou was a fascinating MC. She didn't ...more

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Feb 28, 2018 Lena rated it it was amazing

Shelves: vampire, steampunk, nocturnalbookbox, western

"I’m very glad to have met you. I never knew there was anyone like you in the whole world."

I loved this book.

Anything this unique makes description difficult but here goes: Early Anita Blake set in an unfamiliar paranormal post Civil War America with a je ne sais quoi of The Sky Is Yours.

I never had any idea what would happen next. That is so rare. This book was fluid and erotic, violent and intelligent.

This was one of one.

Vermilion was part of the December 2017 Nocturnal Readers Book Box. ...more

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Feb 22, 2018 Bookteafull (Danny) rated it really liked it

Shelves: gaybies

Actual Rating: 3.8

This book was surprisingly entertaining considering I had never heard about it before. I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of LGBTQ+ characters represented. The protagonist was a Chinese American non-binary individual with no preference for pronoun, Lou’s character also kind of reminded me of Mulan (which is always a plus, #amiright?).

The character Dynamics were refreshingly new and often developed in a way that I did not expect but was still realistic to their ...more

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Dec 11, 2015 Julie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: race-and-race-relations, non-white-mc, rereads, historical, parent-child-feelings, lgbtqa, urban-fantasy, dmla, asia-or-aapi, western

A true 3.5 stars, in that I really can't decide whether to round up or down, and I change my opinion based on the day, the alignment of the stars, etc etc. The prose here gets the job done: Tanzer's pacing is a little slow, since the five days I spent reading Vermilion felt a bit longer. I said this in comments, but it's less like action-packed urban fantasy, and more of a sedate Western, meandering its way onwards throughout the plot and a vivid setting. The humour isn't laugh-out-loud funny, ...more

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Jun 04, 2015 Sigrid Ellis rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction-mystery, fiction-fantasy, fiction-paranormal, fiction-historical

I read Elizabeth Bear's _Karen Memory_ before I read Vermilion. The comparison stuck in my head. Both books are set in a fantasy analog of the American West in a fantasy analog of the late 1800s. Both feature a woman protagonist who is unconventionally employed and transgressive. Both books are aware of the systematic erasure of people of color, women, and queers from the actual history of the actual American West.

Bear's book is better-written, tighter, cleaner, with better pacing and a better ...more

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Jan 05, 2016 Jason Pettus rated it it was amazing

Shelves: weird, contemporary, smart-nerdy, sci-fi

Out of the large stack of books recently sent to us by horror publisher Word Horde, Molly Tanzer's Vermilion is the first full-length novel of theirs I've gotten to read (the rest so far have been story anthologies); and it certainly does not disappoint, a sprawling and epic steampunk tale with supernatural elements and lots of strange little details in its world-building (such as the intelligent bears who live in the Rocky Mountain region, who like Native Americans have negotiated a ...more

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Jun 05, 2018 Ricky rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, historical-fiction, freaky-supernatural-adventures, why-isn-t-this-a-bloody-movie-yet

Recommended by my good friend Harry, this is my first time reading a book by Molly Tanzer, and it's clear to me that she's slipped under my radar too long. This story of Lou, a late 19th-century psychopomp with mixed Chinese heritage and a tendency for gender fluidity in her presentation, is pretty well-tailored to Harry's style, and very appealingly so too. There's a lot of darkness to go around, and some dark humor too - witness Lou's first scene where she talks to a particularly reluctant to ...more

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Sep 15, 2015 Kagama-the Literaturevixen rated it it was ok

Recommends it for: If you like to read where its not so much the matter who you are but what your sexual preferences is

Shelves: steampunk, disguised-as-a-boy-or-girl, asian-fantasy

Lou Merriwether is a psychopomp ,someone who helps put ghosts to rest before they turn into wrathful spirits.Since her mother is a chinese woman and her father was an englisman she is part of both worlds and yet stuck between them.

When she is told her estranged mother Ailien has requested her help she has no choice but to go and visit her.

Her mother tells her that several young chinese men has vanished after being offered work in Wyoming. After a gruesome package is delivered to one of the ...more

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May 06, 2019 Donna Tallent rated it it was ok

Shelves: read-owned

She might not like her client much, but no psychopomp worth her salt ever mocked the grieving.

Lou Merriwether is what's known as a psychopomp, a person aimed at helping the ghosts realize they are ready to leave the world of the living. When she hears that some men have gone missing from Chinatown, the real adventure begins.

I was so bummed with this book! It was set in San Francisco in the 1800's with a steampunk/western vibe. It was strange and glorious. Lou, half-Chinese, was young, witty, ...more

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Dec 28, 2015 Janet rated it liked it

The book takes place in the late 1800s american west. And the main character is half Chinese, half English. Who is a girl disguised as a boy. Who performs exorcisms of dead bodies. Unfortunately there are also talking sea lions. And talking bears. And werewolves. And vampires. And magical elixirs. Along with all the aspects of racism and the Wild West and all the rest. And the book just spends so much time bouncing around introducing you to these random things that it just doesn't click with ...more

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Jan 26, 2018 Feli rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, nocturnal-reader-s-box, ghost-stories, alternate-history

I loved this book, it's just so crazy! It is a wild genre-mix with Steampunk elements in it as well as ghosts and vampires and Psychopompery and Chinese-undead-what?-zombies? and it is like sci-fi, but simultaneously an alternate history with western elements in it and I don't know what else. It is weird and interesting and so much fun to read.
There are some parts where I thought "Okay, maybe I didn't get something, but why exactly is she talking and smoking cigarettes with a knitting bear on a ...more

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Sep 14, 2016 Max added it

Enormous fun. Tanzer couples excellent research (and great tongue-in-cheek Shaw Brothers references) with smooth, sharp humor, a flip distrust of systems, and occasional bits of gut-clenching gore all the more outstanding for how smoothly they fit with the rest. After the prologue Lou comes into play and the narrative rolls beautifully along, in a third person so molded to the main character's head that it feels like first, but with more flexibility. The back cover copy says "puts the punk back ...more

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Mar 05, 2015 Jenna rated it it was amazing

tl;dr version: Read this book. If you love the places where speculative fictions overlap, this is the place for you. A lil weird west, a lil steampunk, a little alt-history, entirely delicious read. It really took me back to that place of the essential joy in reading.

Excerpted from my blog @ jenna-bird.blogspot.com:

Vermilion is the story of Elouise Merriwether - Lou for short. Lou is half-Chinese and lives in San Francisco in the late 1800s, but on an alt-Earth. Here, alchemy is real and ghosts ...more

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Apr 17, 2016 E. Chow rated it did not like it

Vermilion begins in Victorian San Francisco. A lot of readers say the book lost interest when the main character leaves San Francisco. For me it was much earlier, with the main character's relationship with her mother. It really felt like I was reading an imitation of Amy Tan. This is not a good thing. Growing up Chinese American, I never met anyone who acted like the stereotyped mother-daughter relationships Amy Tan sold to white people. A lot of white people really bought the stereotype. It's Vermilion begins in Victorian San Francisco. A lot of readers say the book lost interest when the main character leaves San Francisco. For me it was much earlier, with the main character's relationship with her mother. It really felt like I was reading an imitation of Amy Tan. This is not a good thing. Growing up Chinese American, I never met anyone who acted like the stereotyped mother-daughter relationships Amy Tan sold to white people. A lot of white people really bought the stereotype. It's really not true to life in any way. It's a racial caricature. Tanzer swallowed it whole and regurgitated it as though it's some essentialist truth about Chinese mothers. I'm 1,000% certain that Molly Tanzer has no idea what it's like "inside my house" or the house of any other Chinese American woman.
The fantasy was interesting at first. There's magic based on Chinese beliefs, and the lives of Chinese American workers in San Francisco. Unfortunately, the story completely abandons any pretense of interest in Chinese culture, Taoism, and Chinese American people. It starts with geung si but it ends with a very cliched European vampire. The "Chinese dragon" bears no similiarity to anything from Chinese mythology. It's really just a European dragon wearing a cheongsam.
The research that went into Vermilion is so cursory that I suspect the author spent five minutes on wikipedia reading about Chinese rituals and another ten minutes reading wiki pages about immigration history. The brutality of racism receives lip service. The "Chinese" culture here is all so superficial that I wound up finding it rather offensive.
Vermilion portrays Chinese people as oppressed and mystical. There's really nothing more to her portrayal, we're only a colorful backdrop of mystical, oppressed people. It reminds me of Dances with Wolves because they both want to appear respectful and caring, but they both demonstrate such lack of interest in the actual people they're supposed to be about that they wind up really disrespectful and uncaring. Our victimhood is really just a plot device that allows the main character to show sympathy for our plight. It allows the white author and her white readers to embrace their racism while telling themselves they oppose racism. On the one hand, Vermilion is condescending, racially stereotyped, and shows a total lack of interest in the people it pretends to be about. The other hand is busy patting itself on the back for how not-racist they are.
I really admire the inclusion of LGBT elements, but it's all done so superficially that it feels like off ticking off items on a checklist. This is how the book approaches everything, just a mess of quirky ingredients thrown together to pander to every current trend. Talking bears and other animals are stand-ins for Native Americans. There are sexual libertines and steampunk imagery. Nothing is committed to, nothing is realized. It's just pandering. It's another reason I find Vermilion's representation of my culture offensive and somewhat racist. Chinese culture is only there to add an exotic spice, just another quirk for the character to wear when she feels like it and take off at the end of the day, like steampunk goggles. Lou Merriweather is supposed to be half-white and half-Chinese, but really she's just the white lady who wears chopsticks in her hair. The experiences and feelings of minorities are written superficially, without any depth or insight. It's just exploitation.
I'm focusing on this because it makes me really angry, but it's Vermilion is really bad in many other ways. The pacing feels like trudging through quicksand. The writing is very amateurish. The characters are one-dimensional. It's a terrible book. ...more

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Apr 04, 2015 Renae rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-in-2015, genre-steampunk, character-ghosts, character-immortals, character-vampires, topic-lgbtqia, topic-feminism, setting-usa-co

Okay okay okay. So here’s the thing: Vermilion sounds excellent, but it’s even better in reality. I was completely blown away by this story, by Lou Merriwether as a protagonist, and by how author Molly Tanzer went about it. This book is a wonderfully diverse steampunkish paranormal adventure that was a delight to read—Tanzer really nailed everything here.

So, firstly, our protagonist, Lou Merriwether. Lou is a half-Chinese woman living in San Francisco in 1870. She dresses like a man, smokes Okay okay okay. So here’s the thing: Vermilion sounds excellent, but it’s even better in reality. I was completely blown away by this story, by Lou Merriwether as a protagonist, and by how author Molly Tanzer went about it. This book is a wonderfully diverse steampunkish paranormal adventure that was a delight to read—Tanzer really nailed everything here.

So, firstly, our protagonist, Lou Merriwether. Lou is a half-Chinese woman living in San Francisco in 1870. She dresses like a man, smokes cigarettes, and cuts her hair short. Also, she’s a psychopomp—an exorcist—in charge of her own agency. If this is not a great pitch for a main character, I don’t know what is. Though there was a lot to love about Vermilion, I think that Lou was my favorite part. She’s rash and sarcastic and maybe a bit crazy, but she’s 100% herself 100% of the time. I loved that Tanzer was able to show this young woman as being confident in who she was, but also doubting herself at times too, because that happens to the best of us. In Lou, I found a character I could root for and invest in, one who (in spite of her outlandish steampunk circumstances) was one I could see realism and truth in. That is the kind of character I love to find, in speculative fiction or any other genre.

Perhaps equally important to the crafting of Lou’s character is the setting. Vermilion takes place in an alternative United States in which most paranormal creatures (vampires, ghosts, demons, jinns, werewolves, etc.) exist, and also one in which the Union won the Civil War only with the aid of bears. Yes, bears. Unlike other “monsters”, the bears in this book (and also sea lions) are more or less fully integrated members of society. They walk, talk, and take part in the government. I just really freaking loved the bears, okay. Aside from them, I loved the way the paranormal was expressed in this book. Tanzer has taken cues from Taoist necromancy, and it seems like she’s done her research quite well. Which is important! That sense of legitimacy and respect definitely upped my enjoyment of the story.

And, what a story. From the beginning, when Lou is exorcising the rightfully cranky wife of a rather awful husband, things are exciting. It turns out that many young Chinese men have been disappearing lately, and Lou’s mother recruits her to go find out what happened. Which leads to a train ride to the Rocky Mountains, a seriously sketchy sanatorium, and other nefarious paranormal shenanigans. Lou tends to rush in headlong with only a half-baked plan, which is part of her charm, but it never gets annoying. Vermilion is a bit longer than the average novel, but every page felt justified and nothing felt unnecessary.

ALSO: hella diversity in this book. Which bears mentioning, because, hello: it’s important. So aside from the cross-dressing WOC protagonist, we have multiple POC characters, several queer characters, at least two Jewish characters, and one intersex character (!). Plus, there’s a lot of intersectionality going on in here, which is also important. I definitely felt like Vermilion reflected reality a lot better than many books I’ve been reading lately. So, I’m just saying. It’s kind of sad that this level of representation is so rare in fiction that I need to specifically point it out, but I’m so glad that Molly Tanzer did what she did here.

So in short: Vermilion is awesome and everyone should read it very soon. A great protagonist, excellent world-building, amazing story—everything I could ever ask for is here in this book. This is the rare book that actually has me (sort of) wishing for a sequel. It’s just that good. ...more

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Nov 22, 2016 Jacqie rated it liked it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This book is a bit awkwardly pieced together, although it was entertaining to read. It's divided into three parts. In the first, we are introduced to Lou and her occupation of psychopomp in an anternate 1800's San Francisco. Lou is part Chinese and part white. She often passes as a man, dressing in trousers and letting those she meets make their own assumptions. I enjoyed this part of the book- we got to see Lou doing her job, setting spirits of the recently dead to rest. She has a lot of cool ...more

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She-Geeks: November 2015 Read (Paranormal): Vermilion	1	17	Nov 01, 2015 08:26PM

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About Molly Tanzer

Molly Tanzer

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Molly Tanzer is the British Fantasy and Wonderland Book Award-nominated author of two collections: A Pretty Mouth (Lazy Fascist, 2012) and Rumbullion and Other Liminal Libations (Egaeus, 2013). Her debut novel, Vermilion (Word Horde) was an NPR Best Book of 2015. Her second novel, The Pleasure Merchant, is now available, and her next, Creatures of Will and Temper, will be available in late 2017. ...more